Penal duress in (post)colonial Myanmar
Published date | 01 November 2023 |
DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806231162602 |
Author | Andrew M. Jefferson,Tomas Max Martin |
Date | 01 November 2023 |
Penal duress in (post)colonial
Myanmar
Andrew M. Jeffersonand Tomas Max Martin
DIGNITY - DanishInstitute AgainstTorture, Denmark
Abstract
This article explores the notion and nature of penal duress, illustrated through analysis
of martial, penal practice in Myanmar. We examine prison labour and pone-san (a
demeaning, defamatory and coercive control of prisoners’bodies) to show how these
two enduring practices of domination, subjection and constraint –understood, drawing
on Ann Laura Stoler, as relations of duress –animate penal practice in powerful, pro-
ductive and problematic ways. Resisting the urge to view imperial forms through a per-
ipheralising northern lens, or solely in terms ofcontinuity and discontinuity, we pursue
an understanding of penal duress as a ubiquitous, yet distinctly situated and relational
phenomenon that has taken form through local colonial experiences and their afterlives.
In sum, we attend to ‘processes of partial inscriptions, modified displacements and amp-
lified recuperations’to discuss how relations of penal duress are endured and enduring
in Myanmar today.
Keywords
empire, carcerality, penal duress, Myanmar/Burma, history
To the death mill
During the hot, dry season of 1900, the Danish journalist, Henrik Cavling –considered
the grandfather of modern Danish journalism –visited Myanmar (then known as Burma)
and recorded in glorious detail his impressions of Rangoon jail, at the time one of the
most populated in the region with 1400 prisoners (Cavling, 1901: 101). Cavling was
Corresponding author:
Andrew M. Jefferson, DIGNITY- Danish Institute against Torture, Bryggervangen 55, Copenhagen DK 2100 Ø,
Denmark.
Email: amj@dignity.dk
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2023, Vol. 27(4) 538–554
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13624806231162602
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
curious to see the prison’s infamous ‘death mill’and his brief account is a breath-taking
portrait of colonial prison labour and bodily subjugation.
Upon entering the gate, he is met by a young British prison superintendent, who is
busy shaving and only has time for a cursory left-handed wave. As he enters the
prison compound, hundreds of prisoners throw themselves down on their knees, prostrat-
ing themselves and kissing the ground. He feels awkward at their ‘unnecessary incon-
venience’and suggests that the accompanying prison guard teach them more
self-respect. The guard tells him that this behaviour is, in fact, obligatory and expresses
a 1000-year-old tradition of how the Burmese greet their king. ‘I got the feeling that I was
royalty then’Cavling records,
1
‘but the effect was of course weakened by the fact that
each and every subject was a prisoner’(Cavling, 1901: 102).
The first stop on Cavling’s tour is the cells, inside of which prisoners are tasked to turn
a handle that propelled an oilseed press. ‘I took over from one of the prisoners for a
moment’, Cavling writes, ‘and got an impression of the terrible work. The unhappy [pris-
oners] had to turn [the handle] for four hours …On the floor, where they stood, was the
damp stain of their sweat’(1901: 102). Cavling then crosses the courtyard, passing a
three-person scaffold (leaving no doubt about the capacity to kill), passing prisoners
binding and lining the colonial administration’s ledgers, before reaching the main
prison workshop. Here, prisoners make furniture and Cavling describes the sweat
‘hailing’from their half-naked bodies as they worked ‘in silent subjugation, bearing
witness to an iron-hard discipline’(1901: 103). He finally reaches the ‘death mill’,
which turns out to be a giant treadmill –over 30 metres long –powering the machines
in the workshop as over 60 prisoners tread the wheel for four uninterrupted hours.
Cavling watches as the prisoners twist their bodies to shift their feet and closes his
account like this:
Then one sees […] a row of broken, pleading, flaming, raging and evil glances, and for a
moment one feels the entire sum of all the human physical and spiritual passion and pain con-
tained inside the walls of this terrible torture chamber. It is such a nerve-wracking feeling that
one shudders with emotion and dashes out (Cavling, 1901:105).
Cavling observes prison labour and bodily subjugation as a conscientious-
cum-complicit outsider, appalled by the suffering he witnesses. He is ambivalent about
the majestic position he is afforded by the prostrating prisoners, but his account
remains enmeshed in the racial and civilising rationalities of his time. We open our
article with his observations because they vividly and viscerally display the relations
of duress that can still be discerned in penal practice in Myanmar today. Not, we
argue, that history is repeating itself; it simply never went away.
This article explores the notion and nature of penal duress, illustrated through analysis
of martial penal practice in Myanmar. We unpack the way in which two practices of dom-
ination, subjection and constraint –understood, drawing on Ann Laura Stoler, as relations
of duress (2016) –with deep roots in ‘imperial formations’animate penal practice in
powerful, productive and problematic ways in Myanmar today. Prior to the military
coup of 1 February 2021 and the ensuing political repression, violent conflict and
weaponisation of the criminal justice system, discourses about prisons in Myanmar
Jefferson and Martin539
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